Sculptor Arturo Di Modica wants the city to remove the Fearless Girl statue that, he says, is interfering with his Charging Bull statue 25 feet away. It’s easy to make fun of Di Modica for being afraid of a little girl. But on the merits, City Hall has made a mistake with Fearless Girl — one that plays into stereotypes about women.

Charging Bull stands on Broadway in lower Manhattan thanks to what now looks like an old-fashioned caper, impossible to do today. Di Modica worked on the statue in SoHo after the 1987 stock-market crash, creating what he says is a “symbol of virility and courage.”

Two years later, he put the 3 ¹/₂ ton bronze animal into a truck and dropped it off in the night under the New York Stock Exchange’s Christmas tree (the city moved it).

This spring, Boston-based financial firm State Street Global Advisors used the bull as a gimmick. The company commissioned a sculpture from Kristen Visbal of the little girl confronting the bull.

Public Advocate Letitia James has called for a permanent installation to show women that “no dream is too big and no ceiling is too high.”

City officials should realize they’re playing a dangerous game. De Blasio is allowing Fearless Girl to stay not because he supports free speech but because he supports this free speech.

It’ll almost certainly come back to bite the city.

That’s because the mayor has set an arbitrary precedent — this statue can stay because I like its politics — that’ll be used against the city in court. What if Black Lives Matter protesters want a statue of police brutalizing a black man in front of One Police Plaza?

But the bigger problem with Fearless Girl is that it casts stereotypes in bronze: Men do important things, and women get in the way.

The bull is the primary actor: He is charging. The girl’s job is to impede him. This is how Wall Street has long worked — and it’s changing, but slowly.

Take the management committee of State Street’s parent company. Of its 14 members, two are women. One, the chief administrative officer, is a top regulatory official. The other is the human-resources chief and “citizenship officer.”

On Goldman Sachs’ 33-member management committee, five of our women — at least four of whom are in similar, growth-restraining positions.

Yes, growth-restraining: These are great jobs and require deep skill. But they’re bureaucratic rather than entrepreneurial. If a department head — a man — wants to start up a new unit, it’s the regulatory experts who will say, no, you can’t.

Similarly, a trading head may want to hire someone — but the human-resources chief nixes it.

Indeed, the area of “compliance” — which sounds like an S&M activity but has to do with ensuring that the bank and its employees don’t launder money, steal or do other bad things — is where women have done well.

At the investment bank where I worked in the late ’90s, hard-charging men would sign up new customers without getting all their tax information. They’d demand the staff deposit customers’ checks right away, anyway.

If those women weren’t successful in pushing back against the powerful men, the woman compliance officer would do the job — but not too zealously.

This work is necessary. A company can’t grow if it’s convicted of money-laundering or if its employees are thieves (in theory).

But it’s also the depressing age-old relationship: A man wants to do something fun and cool, like take the children paragliding before they’ve had a proper breakfast. His wife says, “But honey, the kids have band practice today, and maybe we should save the money for the mortgage.”

Fearless Girl fails in another way. It’s terrific to have courage and fight important battles. But it’s not a good idea — for men, women or children — to be recklessly fearless.

Fear is a good thing. If a bull is charging you, according to the farming manuals, the best thing to do is what you instinctively do: get out of the way. If you don’t pick your battles, you’ll lose them.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. ​